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How Equifax Analytics helps Indian CIOs put complex data to work

Equifax InterConnect is a secure, cloud-based, decision management system that enables financial institutions to enhance customer acquisition and optimize loan decisioning, facilitating application to decision in seconds, KM Nanaiah, Country Head, Equifax said in an interview with ETCIO.

ETCIO | January 30, 2019, 16:57 IST

EquifaxAnalytics announced the launch of Equifax Interconnect, a cloud based, modular, agile and secure decision management system that is designed to help Indian financial organisations to transform complex data and decision strategies into actionable insights.

InterConnect helps financial institutions to digitize their end to end decision management systems by leveraging power of business rule engine, access to bureau data, alternative data sources and predictive analytics. It also enables organizations to build a straight through digital approval process powered by data and analytics.

“Equifax InterConnect is a secure, cloud-based, decision management system that enables financial institutions to enhance customer acquisition and optimize loan decisioning, facilitating application to decision in seconds! It enables lower application drop-offs thus resulting in improvement in approval rates, customer onboarding and help mitigate identity risk through pre-built integrations with established Indian databases”, KM Nanaiah, Country Head, Equifax said in an interview with ETCIO.

How does the credit and risk assessment cloud-based platform help enterprises in transforming complex data and decision strategies?

InterConnect powers banks, NBFC’ and financial institutions of all sizes to transform complex data and decision strategies into actionable insights through the following:

Rapid integration and easy deployment of models and scorecards, through cutting edge PMML-based model deployment. Simply integrate models/scorecards and deploy, no need to redevelop models in languages such as Java, C++

Simulations and advanced testing capabilities that empower financial institutions to understand what are the right strategies to deploy

Champion-Challenger testing that enables financial institutions to understand the performance of business rules and policies, through execution of strategy experiments.

How can CIOs optimize data structure and elevate their systems with predictive analytics?

It is important to identify different data assets in the organization stored in the source systems like core banking systems and CRMs. There can be foot prints available in portals, dialer systems and other customer touch points. The key would be to fetch these data through ETL tools or data mirroring mechanisms and organize them in Data lakes. Some of the data may be in structured format in relational databases and some can be in unstructured format like logs, audio or documents. Big data technologies support both of these to be stored in a data lake.

Once the data lake is built, it can be further mutated and stored in separate schemas as individual data marts. This can be in normalized form or denormalized form based on the use case for consumption. Multidimensional cubes can also be built on top of these to support reports and dashboards with drill down and drill through features. The marts can be connected to analytical tools to do statistical analysis to build models and score cards.

Are you investing in AI driven analytics projects?

Our models and analytics are built using the latest tools and techniques. We are investing heavily in supervised and self-learning machine learning models which form the bedrock of effective analytical interventions in areas like credit and fraud risk. AI is the next level of evolution and all investments are in line with the trend that machine learning will power these projects.

AI is steadily transforming organizations. The power of domain knowledge and experience is what makes analytics and therefore AI effective and this need to be leveraged to transform enterprises. With machines taking care of what human beings had to do on a repeated basis, the analysts can now focus on more important and transformative ideas that will change the way business is conducted. AI and ML are great aids to analytics professionals and are being used at Equifax to deliver best in class implementable analytical solutions.